Server vendors make a lot of noise about how reliable their systems are, but how do they really stack up? It’s hard to say. Getting qualitative information out of vendors is easy enough–they all seem to have the most reliable machines ever built–but what about some objective quantitative information that puts these claims to the test? This kind of data is hard to come by, but it does exist.

Laura DiDio, a server analyst who used to be at Yankee Group until she left to start up her own gig over at Information Technology Intelligence Corp, used to do

I haven’t forgotten that I promised some kind of deeper analysis into IBM‘s second quarter sales in its Systems and Technology Group. As you well know, Big Blue’s financial reports leave as many questions unanswered as replied to when they come out each quarter, leaving us all scratching our heads and wondering how much money the various server lines actually brought in. I wrestled with my spreadsheet model of IBM’s server sales last Friday, and here is what I came up with.

I make no promises about the accuracy of the numbers I put forward. All financial models start

I get the impression there are no night lights in Bob Cancilla’s home. Every switch is wired to a high-intensity bulb. The volume on the TV is always on full blast. I wouldn’t expect him to have 300-thread-count bed sheets. They’d be #50 grade sandpaper. Cancilla, who is one of the many gurus of the AS/400 community, is a likeable enough guy, but some find him nothing less than acerbic, especially when it comes to the IBM i. He says IBM will drop it in the next five to seven years.

He might as well have whacked a hornet’s nest

The 22nd Amendment of the United States Constitution limits a President to two terms. It is a model for other laws favoring electoral change, if not progress. Corporate client computers used to have term limits, too; they were usually replaced after 24 to 36 months. No longer. Companies are now slower to oust incumbent hardware and software. Significantly, Windows XP, launched in 2001, will survive for years on its own and also as a guest of Windows 7. This persistence creates a daunting challenge to an industry that had always counted on lively, progressive customers.

The imposition of a limit

Despite the poor economic climate, i OS banking software developer Jack Henry and Associates managed to increase revenues and net income during its fiscal fourth quarter ended June 30, closing out a challenging year on an optimistic note. With its stock price at a 52-week high, the Monett, Missouri, company announced plans to acquire Goldleaf Financial Solutions, a publicly traded developer of payment processing and automated deposit capture solutions for banks, for about $61 million.

Fourth quarter revenues for Jack Henry increased 2 percent to $192 million. The bulk of that revenue came from support and services contracts, which

Whenever you bring up the topic of the RPG programming language to the AS/400 community, it gets their attention, and Brian Kelly’s walk down memory lane for RPG in last week’s issue of The Four Hundred predictably resonated with readers. Here’s some of the feedback that readers sent to Kelly, offering advice to IBM and commiserating with the frustration that RPG programmers sometimes feel in a corporate computing landscape dominated by Java, C#, PHP, and other languages.

Hi, Brian:

Thanks for your great RPG article today.

I did code in Fargo and the 1401 RPG, and I have a copy

Big Blue is getting ready to lift the curtain a little higher on its forthcoming Power7 processors. Tomorrow (August 25), two of the top chip techies at IBM will be giving presentations at the annual Hot Chips conference hosted by the IEEE at Stanford University describing the Power7 chips and their related server technology.

As we reported at the end of July, IBM has already confirmed that the Power7 chips, which are expected sometime early next year, will come in different sizes, with four, six, or eight processor cores. And to keep customers from getting too nervous, IBM has also

Providers of third-party maintenance services for JD Edwards ERP systems announced significant investments in their businesses recently, pointing to strong growth in the field. Rimini Street announced plans to open new offices in six countries by the end of the year. Meanwhile, a new player in the third-party maintenance racket, Spinnaker has taken a significant share of the market since launching its JD Edwards maintenance business 12 months ago.

Spinnaker quietly entered the third-party maintenance business for JD Edwards in August 2008 as an extension of its supply chain consulting and outsourcing business, which had been around for most of

It has been a comforting fact for many IT professionals in the recent decade, with its two recessions, that information technology has become entrenched in not just our corporations, but in our lives as citizens and consumers. To borrow a recent phrase, IT has become too big to fail. And you know what that means: government regulations and oversight.

If you thought Sarbanes-Oxley was bad, brace yourself, IT people. The government is going to try to use regulations and oversight of IT networks to try to take on criminal hacking networks and other hackers who are menacing the tens of

IBM is a-wheeling and a-dealing in the Power Systems market again. Last week, the company was offering rebates on memory activations on Power 595 machines using its Power6 processors.

Under the Power 595 Memory Rebate promotion, which is outlined in announcement letter 309-561, customers who buy a new Power 595 or upgrade to one using the Power6 processors can get a rebate back from Big Blue worth $290 per GB on the DDR2 main memory used on the machine. The amount of the rebate ranges from $74,240 with one 256 GB activation chunk to as high as just under